Physical fitness is commonly achieved by engaging in cardiopulmonary and resistance exercise training. Cardiopulmonary training improves the endurance and functional capacities of the body's cardiovascular and pulmonary systems. Sustained, repetitive body movement that elevates heart rate levels to between 50% and 85% of maximum typically achieves cardiopulmonary training. Resistance exercise training improves muscular strength. Resistance exercise training is achieved by exerting the muscles against an oppositional force, including but not limited to the force produced by other muscles, a source of elastic tension, pneumatic resistance, or by gravity. Resistance exercise devices allow a user to exercise their muscles by providing such resistance to the movement of a user's arms, legs, or torso. Adequate muscular strength training also includes the conditioning of opposing agonist-antagonist or “push-pull” muscle groups. The minimum guidelines for strength and endurance exercises recommended by the American College of Sports Medicine include at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity cardiopulmonary exercise per week (30 minutes of exercise 5 days per week) and resistance exercise training of each major muscle group two to three days per week.
There are few portable products available on the market that can provide multiple modes of exercise training. Training to improve both cardiopulmonary and muscular fitness often requires a variety of exercises, which may demand a user to engage multiple fitness devices. Such equipment can be space consuming and immobile. For this reason, visitation to a fitness training facility, such as a gym, is often required for an adequate training bout. This can often be inconvenient or unobtainable. As a result, sufficient fitness training can become inaccessible to many people. Even those who maintain regular gym membership will often forgo exercising while travelling or when their regular schedule is otherwise disrupted. There are many products on the market that claim to offer a complete, whole-body workout. However, there are few portable products on the market that adequately and comprehensively condition both the cardiopulmonary and muscular systems.
There is a need to provide a multifunction, portable exercise device that makes endurance training and agonist-antagonist resistance training more convenient. Such a device would include adjustments to change configurations and facilitate a wide range of stances and exercises that provide resistance to the user's motion in a form that is useful for physical training. In addition, there is a need for the aforementioned device to be sufficiently portable such that it can be used in a variety of locations to allow for convenient exercise. Current multipurpose exercise equipment can be too large to be portable. Other exercise equipment, including, but not limited to other inelastic suspension systems, free-weights, stationary weight machines, elastic training systems, alternative resistance systems, the conventional jump rope, the treadmill, the stationary bicycle, and/or other endurance and resistance training equipment are often limited to stationary use and/or the scope of training that they can provide. Few alternative systems provide both muscular resistance and cardiopulmonary endurance training. Those that do provide muscular resistance training are often limited in the muscular groups that they exercise and/or lack the means to train complimentary agonist-antagonist muscle groups with the same device. The invention claimed here solves these problems.